Views from the Streets, by Roberto R. Aspholm (introduction)

Roberto R. Aspholm

HE T OM R F S W E I V

S T E E O'S SOUTH SIDE

N THE TRA

R ICAG H C N O T E S NGS AND VIOLENC

OF GA N O I T A SFORM

Introduction

Chicago has long symbolized the municipal embodiment of violence, street gangs, and urban pathology within the public imagination—“first in violence, deepest in dirt,” as the century-old reputation goes.1 Over the past decade, moreover, the city has experienced a resurgence in national media coverage related to its gangs and persistently high levels of violent crime, spawning countless news stories and journalistic profiles of the city often referred to as “Chi-raq,” an allusion to Chicago as a devastated battlefield akin to the war-torn nation of Iraq.2 The city’s reputation for gangs and violence has recently reclaimed a central place in popular culture as well, as award-winning filmmakers have directed acclaimed films examining these topics, television networks have churned out a profusion of new shows, and a cadre of young rappers from Chicago’s South Side have propelled “drill music,” their self-styled brand of gangsta rap, into the international spotlight, netting major-label record deals and fueling local gang feuds in the process.3 Chicago has also assumed a high-profile position in the nation’s political discourse, as Barack Obama addressed the violence plaguing his adopted hometown on a number of occasions during the final years of his presidency, and the topic was a notable theme in the presidential debates of 2016.4 In short, Chicago’s long-standing reputation for gangs and violence has repenetrated America’s collective consciousness and public discourse in a singular, far-reaching fashion in recent years.

2 INTRODUCTION

As with nearly every other city in the United States, levels of violence in Chicago peaked during the early 1990s before falling during the latter part of that decade and the early years of the twenty-first century as part of the “great American crime decline.”5 Following a decade of reductions, however, Chicago’s homicide rate stabilized around 2004 and remained remarkably steady over the ensuing decade—a period during which nearly every other major U.S. city enjoyed further, substantial declines in killings— before skyrocketing in 2016 to levels not seen since the bloody gang wars of the 1990s.6 The stark reality is that Chicago has led the nation in total homicides each year since 2012. Indeed, Chicago’s homicide tallies have far exceeded those of Los Angeles and New York, cities with 1.2 million and 5.8 million more residents, respectively, as well as those cities most comparable to Chicago historically in terms of homicide rate (see figure 0.1).

Astoundingly, Chicago recorded more homicides than New York and Los Angeles combined in 2016, 2017, and 2018, assuming the dubious distinction as the most violent among the twenty largest cities in the United States.7

1.2

Relative homicide rate

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

Year Chicago

Los Angeles

New York

FIGURE 0.1. Homicide rates for New York and Los Angeles as a proportion of Chicago’s homicide rate, 1985–2017 Source: Data from U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Uniform Crime Reports,” accessed January 26, 2017, https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime in the U.S.,” accessed July 18, 2019, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u. s

3 INTRODUCTION

Much of Chicago’s violence has been attributed to its street gangs, which include many of the country’s oldest, largest, and most notorious—the Black P Stones, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, and Vice Lords, among several others. Local and national law enforcement agencies claim that Chicago is home to as many as one hundred gangs, with a combined membership of 150,000, and that Illinois has the highest per-capita rate of gang membership of any state in the nation. The Chicago Police Department, moreover, has cited “street gang altercations” as the primary motive for homicides in the city since at least 1991, the earliest year for which such data are available.8 While the inherently political nature of law enforcement information on street gangs demands an appropriately cautious interpretive approach, gangs and violence have been undeniably serious issues in many Chicago communities for decades.

Yet, in spite of these bleak realities and Chicago’s resurgent national profile as the epicenter of street gangs and urban violence, little street-level research has been conducted exploring the nature of these realities in recent years.9 This is disappointing, given the rich, century-long tradition of trailblazing scholarship on gangs and violence in Chicago, which provided important insights into these dynamics as the city’s landscape evolved and helped shape the standards for research on these topics more broadly as well.10 The dearth of recent research on these issues, moreover, means that the prevailing narratives on gangs and violence in Chicago have been largely shaped by law enforcement agencies, elected officials, and mass media outlets. As such, these narratives reflect the respective viewpoints and interests of these powerful entities as they pertain to these issues, interests that typically include assigning blame for persistent crime problems and justifying requests for increased police funding; consolidating public support for policy agendas, especially those involving punitive criminal justice policies and the withdrawal of public resources from lowincome communities; and increasing viewership and/or readership. In each case, the pursuit of these interests is often facilitated through the creation of what social scientists call “moral panics,” in which “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; [and] socially

4 INTRODUCTION

accredited experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions.”11 This dynamic aptly characterizes the discourse pertaining to gangs and violence in Chicago, especially in the years following the city’s media-anointed “violence epidemic” in 2012.12 The Chicago Crime Commission, for example, paints an ominous picture of Chicago’s gangs as a nebulous and omnipresent menace, claiming that “gangs constitute an entire sector of Chicago’s population, yet even the law enforcement organizations that watch them daily cannot precisely gauge the extent of their presence. . . . Most residents of the city, then, live and work within feet of a gang’s operations.”13 The Chicago Police Department (CPD) warns that gangs in the city have “become more violent” and that “anybody in the area is fair game, including men, women and children.”14 Former CPD superintendent Garry McCarthy has characterized the city as existing in a “state of lawlessness” due to its “very unique gang problem” and mounting public scrutiny of law enforcement.15 Donald Trump has referred to gang members as “animals” who “[transform] peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields” and has described Chicago as “a war zone” and the violence there as “carnage.”16 Richard Boykin, former commissioner for Cook County (home to Chicago), has called gang members “evildoers” and “terrorists” and promoted the notion that gang conflicts in the city amount to “a terrorist siege.”17 Such characterizations have been employed to justify proposing and/or implementing a range of severe policy responses to street gangs and urban violence, both in Chicago and beyond. Trump’s comments about gangs, for example, have been used to rationalize draconian and xenophobic immigration policies as well as proposed federal intervention in Chicago that would be “not . . . so politically correct,” an apparent allusion to the trampling of civil liberties via the intensification of suppressive policing practices.18 Boykin has advocated “charging individuals pulling the trigger and co-conspirators” in gang shootings with “domestic terrorism.”19 Mark Kirk, a former U.S. senator from Illinois, called for the mass arrest and prosecution of eighteen thousand alleged Gangster Disciples in Chicago following the 2013 murder of a teenage girl near Barack Obama’s South Side home.20 More substantively, these narratives have been used to justify generous funding for the CPD, whose 2016 budget accounted for an astonishing 39 percent of Chicago’s entire general fund, placing Chicago

5 INTRODUCTION

second in an analysis of police expenditures in twelve major U.S. cities and totaling nearly five times the New York Police Department’s 8 percent share of their city’s budget.21 The CPD has also enjoyed substantial annual funding increases, including a $60 million bump in 2018, despite a citywide budget shortfall of more than $259 million.22 Chronic corruption within the department and brutality by its officers has cost Chicago taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year as well, with the city shelling out nearly $642 million in civil damages between 2004 and 2015 alone.23 Costly law enforcement and criminal justice projects, moreover, often come at the expense of needed public resources and services, particularly in marginalized communities most impacted by violence. The generous and ever-increasing budget allocations for Chicago police in the twentyfirst century, for example, have been accompanied by the closing of upward of one hundred of the city’s neighborhood public schools, almost all of them in poor and working-class African American communities, under the auspices of “fiscal responsibility.” In 2013 alone, Chicago closed nearly fifty schools, resulting in the displacement of at least twelve thousand students, nearly all of them low-income and African American.24 In addition, the city shuttered six of its public mental health clinics in 2012 and privatized another in 2016, leaving a city of 2.7 million residents with five public mental health facilities. Three of the six centers that were closed, as well as the one that was privatized, were located in low-income areas on Chicago’s South Side.25 Portrayals of street gangs and gang members in the media largely echo those espoused by law enforcement agencies and elected officials. In many cases, the media provide a direct outlet for these powerful social actors to promote their singular view of gangs and gang members as irredeemable criminals. News reports of investigations, crimes, arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of gang members, for example, all rely primarily on information provided by law enforcement and criminal justice officials and, thus, inherently reflect those perspectives and interests. Based on her ethnographic research centered on a federal drug case in two Los Angeles gang neighborhoods, Susan Phillips refers to these ostensibly official accounts as “narratives of precision” that problematically “censor parts of a story . . . and subsequently manufacture key images that justify the shape of police action.”26 In addition, fictional television shows that depict street gangs

6 INTRODUCTION

often do so from the perspective of police and prosecutors, and “real crime” series such as Gangland advance a sensationalistic view of these groups that emphasizes, with near exclusivity, violence and criminality. The first five seasons of that series profiled Chicago gangs in no less than eight episodes, which featured titles such as “Maniacal,” “The Devil’s Playground,” and “Hustle or Die.”27 Indeed, there is perhaps no more potent a distillation of the media’s outsize impact on public perceptions of these issues than its treatment of Chicago. The city’s singular reputation for gangs and violence, which has driven much of the national discourse on these topics in recent years, is largely a media-fueled sleight of hand: While Chicago’s homicide rate is much higher than other U.S. cities firmly established in the twenty-first century global economy—New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and the like—it pales in comparison to deindustrialized rustbelt cities like St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, whose homicide rates consistently surpass Chicago’s by a two-to-one margin.28 This dynamic reflects the reality that the astronomical rates of homicide found in certain sections of Chicago’s South and West Sides are diluted in citywide measures via the virtual absence of serious violence in other areas of the city. Acknowledging these discrepancies between perception and statistical reality, the authors of a 2018 CityLab article concede: “But it’s Chicago that feels like America’s murder capital.”29 Given the media’s relentless fixation on Chicago, it is little wonder why.

In spite of this widespread national attention, however, the questions that have captivated the public imagination since the middle years of the Obama presidency remain largely unanswered: What is going on with the gangs and violence in Chicago? And what might be done to address these issues? Apparently, neither City Hall nor the CPD has an effective understanding of or solution to these problems, as highly touted interventions like focused deterrence policing and the Cure Violence public health model have failed to reduce the city’s stubborn homicide rate and prevent its remarkable explosion in recent years. The research presented in this book provides insights into these important questions and, in doing so, challenges much of the conventional wisdom on contemporary gangs and violence in Chicago (and beyond). As the following chapters describe, the traditional hierarchical outlaw-capitalist street gangs whose leaders once controlled violence on the city’s South Side from the top down have been

7 INTRODUCTION

supplanted by horizontally organized neighborhood cliques engaged in violence that is increasingly unregulated and unpredictable. In short, today’s gangs and the violence in which they are embroiled are radically different from their historical predecessors. Indeed, one of the central refrains in my interviews with Chicago gang members was “this ain’t the nineties no more.” These evolving realities have important implications for addressing gangs and violence in Chicago today, and the contextual approach to analysis delineated in these pages holds lessons for understanding and addressing these issues in other contexts as well.

THE STUDY

The research described in this book evolved out of my experiences living and working on the South Side of Chicago over the course of eight years, first as a graduate student intern, then as a community-based social worker, and, finally, as a doctoral student and researcher. I initially moved to Chicago from my hometown of Minneapolis to attend college and study social work. After completing my undergraduate degree, I secured a graduate internship with a grassroots community organization on the city’s South Side as part of a master’s program in social work and moved from the North Side to Bronzeville, the blighted and impoverished but slowly gentrifying historic South Side ghetto. The move had the intended effect of bringing me closer to my work, both literally and figuratively. During my yearlong internship I helped administer restorative justice, mentoring, and college- and career-readiness programs, and coached the previously defunct track and field team at Walter H. Dyett High School, a tough public school on the northern edge of Washington Park. Dyett became somewhat (in)famous in the years after I left, as soon-to-be rap star Chief Keef attended school there before dropping out during his sophomore year, and community activists waged a highly publicized and ultimately successful campaign—which included a thirty-four-day hunger strike—to stop then mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to close the school in 2015.30 After completing my internship and master’s degree, I took a position with an organization in Woodlawn, a nearby South Side community. Woodlawn had served as the historic birthplace of radical black political power in Chicago during the 1960s, when Saul Alinsky helped neighborhood residents organize The Woodlawn Organization to fight urban-renewal-minded

8 INTRODUCTION

encroachment by the University of Chicago, municipal neglect from the offices of “hizzoner” Mayor Richard J. Daley, and political disfranchisement wrought by the city’s Democratic machine. During this same period, the Blackstone Rangers (later the Black P Stone Nation), widely considered the country’s first “supergang,” also emerged in Woodlawn, as did their bitter rivals, the East Side Disciples, who would become a cornerstone of the fledgling Gangster Disciple Nation by the early 1970s.31 In Woodlawn, I spent two and a half years coordinating a number of youth employment, afterschool, and summer programs and helped organize initiatives and grassroots coalitions to address issues such as youth jobs, sexual health, and community violence. Many of these initiatives were run out of First Presbyterian Church, which had served as the headquarters for the Stones in the late 1960s under the supervision of social radical and Stone champion Rev. John Fry. Old-time churchgoers shared their memories from that era and pointed out to me where gunfire, once intended for the Stones, had chipped away at the church’s gray stone exterior and where stained glass windows shattered by bullets had been repaired.

Many of the youth I worked with in these capacities were gang members; many others were not. Some occupied a space somewhere in the middle, as the notion of “gang membership” as a black-and-white distinction often oversimplifies the more fluid and complex realities of identity, relationships, and neighborhood dynamics that characterize daily life in many Chicago communities. Yet all of these young people were forced to navigate a social and physical world shaped in fundamental ways by gangs and violence. The blocks and neighborhoods where young people lived were largely defined by their place within the gang landscape of the wider community. This dynamic shaped peer associations both in the neighborhood and beyond, served to restrict movement based on territorial considerations, and affected community life more generally as gang members occupied public space in often-conspicuous ways.32 If young people were not gang members themselves, their family members, friends, and neighbors often were, and the violence and incarceration that frequently accompanies gang life therefore affected these youth as well. Indeed, the responses to gangs and violence by law enforcement, city and state governments, and community organizations impacted life in fundamental ways for all community youth, from shaping policing practices that were often applied

9 INTRODUCTION

indiscriminately to black youth in these neighborhoods to helping determine the availability of community programs and resources designed to address these issues.

Some of the efforts with which I was involved seemed to have a positive impact, providing young people with critical resources and opportunities, helping them to improve their lives, and strengthening prosocial community relationships. Other efforts were perhaps less impactful; some seemed downright misguided and perhaps even harmful. Many young people I worked with were unable to escape the pitfalls of gangs, violence, incarceration, and early death. After being involved in organizing a youth-led, cross-community grassroots survey about neighborhood safety and police– community relations, I grew increasingly interested in stepping back to examine the dynamics of street gangs, violence, and community interventions from a research perspective and decided to return to school to pursue a PhD in social work at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

I dove back into the literature on gangs and violence in Chicago with which I had first become acquainted as an undergraduate student. A tremendous amount of scholarship has been published about these topics in Chicago, dating back nearly a century to the 1927 publication of Frederic Thrasher’s groundbreaking book, The Gang, widely considered the foundation on which modern gang research has been built. Dozens of important studies of gangs emerged from Chicago in the ensuing decades, including seminal works by Gerald Suttles, Irving Spergel, Lincoln Keiser, James Jacobs, and Ruth Horowitz.33 The more recent scholarship on Chicago’s street gangs by Sudhir Venkatesh, John Hagedorn, Felix Padilla, and others primarily explores their “corporatization” in the post–civil rights era.

This research describes how, during the last two to three decades of the twentieth century, Chicago’s black and Latino street gangs transformed themselves from youth groups oriented primarily around identity and social support into corporate-style, outlaw-capitalist drug organizations.

This shift was fueled by a number of historical factors, most prominent among them deindustrialization and endemic unemployment, intensifying urban disinvestment, mass incarceration, the crack cocaine epidemic, and a growing sense of nihilism among young people in dispossessed innercity communities in the face of these realities. Many of Chicago’s gangs were well-equipped for corporatization, having established cross-neighborhood

10 INTRODUCTION

federations, central leadership structures, and powerful sets of symbols, rituals, and ideologies during their initial development, which began, in some cases, as early as the late 1950s. The nature of gang warfare, moreover, followed the logic of corporatization, particularly during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, when gang leaders waged wars over the control of illicit drug markets and the amassing of profits and power on the streets and in prison.34 Despite the richness of this scholarship, however, I found little within the literature that reflected what I had seen living and working with gang members and other youth on Chicago’s South Side. Indeed, much of what I had seen stood in stark contrast to the descriptions in the existing research. It was ultimately this dissonance that shaped the questions that guided my dissertation research project. What, exactly, were the contemporary dynamics of gangs and violence on Chicago’s streets? How did they differ from the prevailing dynamics of the 1990s, when most of the more recent existing research had been conducted? To the extent that there were differences between these eras, what had produced these apparent changes?

How might an understanding of the contemporary realities on the streets help make sense of the failure of touted violence prevention models to actually reduce violence in Chicago? What might be more promising alternatives for addressing gangs and violence in the city? My research findings in relation to these questions serve as the basis for this book.

These findings are based primarily on in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with thirty-five African American gang members from Chicago’s South Side (see table 0.1). Thirty of these interviews were conducted with active gang members between the ages of sixteen and thirtyone from fourteen distinct gangs. These participants described a high degree of contact with the criminal justice system, with a median of nearly nine arrests among all participants and reported adult felony convictions for fifteen of them. Only six of these young men reported being formally employed at the time of their interviews, and ten described dropping out of high school and failing to complete high school or general equivalency requirements. All four of the major historic South Side street gangs—the Black Disciples, Black P Stones, Gangster Disciples, and Mickey Cobras— are represented among these study participants, as are “Outlaw” and “Insane” Gangster Disciples and the Four Corner Hustlers, a gang based

TABLE 0.1 Profile of Study Participants Participant

Age

Gang status

Community area

Traditional street gang

Floyd Montrelle Terrence Rick

27 23 22 19

Active Active Active Active

Grand Boulevard Grand Boulevard Grand Boulevard Grand Boulevard

Black Disciples Black Disciples Mickey Cobras Mickey Cobras

Durrell Memphis Kevin

24 22 16

Active Active Active

Washington Park Washington Park Washington Park

Black Disciples Black Disciples Black Disciples

Roosevelt Melvin Cassius

31 24 20

Active Active Active

Woodlawn Woodlawn Woodlawn

Mickey Cobras Gangster Disciples (Outlaw) Gangster Disciples (Outlaw)

Lamont Rasheed

25 21

Active Active

Woodlawn Woodlawn

Black P Stones Black P Stones

David Bibby Cedric

23 22 20

Active Active Active

South Shore South Shore South Shore

None Rollin 60s Crips* Gangster Disciples (Insane)

Carlos

19

Active

Chatham

Black Disciples

Cortez Daequan

23 21

Active Active

Roseland Roseland

Gangster Disciples Four Corner Hustlers

Ronald

24

Active

West Pullman

Black P Stones

Aaron

21

Active

West Pullman

Gangster Disciples

Antonio

24

Active

New City

Black P Stones

Reggie

22

Active

Englewood

Gangster Disciples (Insane)

Javon

20

Active

Englewood

Gangster Disciples

Harold Marco Weezy Zeke

25 21 19 18

Active Active Active Active

Greater Grand Crossing Greater Grand Crossing Greater Grand Crossing Greater Grand Crossing

Black Disciples Black Disciples None Black Disciples

Bernard Jabari James

24 21 20

Active Active Active

Greater Grand Crossing Greater Grand Crossing Greater Grand Crossing

Gangster Disciples Gangster Disciples (Insane) Black P Stones

Pernell

34

Transformed

Woodlawn

Black P Stones

Daniel

55

Transformed

Roseland

Gangster Disciples

Eldridge Paris

48 42

Transformed Transformed

Public housing † Public housing †

Gangster Disciples Gangster Disciples

Lorenzo

50

Transformed

Austin (West Side)‡

Four Corner Hustlers

* Bibby had recently moved to Chicago from Los Angeles, where he was active with the Rollin 60s Crips. He retained this affiliation as his primary gang identity. † Gang life in this neighborhood largely revolved around a public housing development, although not all members of the local gang lived in the projects. ‡ While Lorenzo hailed from the West Side, he had extensive experience working on violence reduction on the South Side as well as in other areas of the city.

12 INTRODUCTION

primarily on Chicago’s West Side. As can be seen in table 0.1 and will be discussed at length in later chapters, many of the study’s participants belonged to gangs comprised of members from more than one of these traditional street gang identities. In addition, two participants belonged to neighborhood-based gangs but did not identify with any of these broader, traditional identities, and one recent transplant from Los Angeles still identified primarily with his LA gang roots.35 Five older gang members who had transformed their lives and were now working to reduce violence in Chicago were also interviewed.36 These men ranged in age from their mid-thirties to mid-fifties and had extensive gang backgrounds and involvement with the criminal justice system during their adolescence and early adulthood. More recently, they had achieved notable success in higher education, with all five having earned college degrees and three holding advanced graduate degrees. These individuals had worked in a variety of capacities in both their native communities as well as throughout the city of Chicago on efforts to reduce violence, facilitate community reentry among returning prisoners, provide resources to distressed families, and build and mobilize grassroots groups to address community needs, among other endeavors. These participants provided a wide-ranging perspective that encompassed their own gang involvement during the 1980s and 1990s, their experiences transitioning out of active gang life, living through changes in the city’s gang landscape over time, and working with young gang members within the context of many of these changes in the twenty-first century.

Study participants hailed from ten low-income, high-violence communities on Chicago’s South Side (see figure 0.2). These communities are among the most marginalized and distressed in the city, with levels of poverty, unemployment, racial segregation, and violence as much as two to three times higher than citywide rates and up to ten times national averages (see table 0.2). These neighborhoods are also among the city’s most blighted, with many having lost more than half of their housing stock over the last half-century due to public and private disinvestment, leading to widespread abandonment, decay, and landlord arson.37 Nearly two-thirds of the schools that remain open in these communities perform below the city average, and these neighborhoods rank among Chicago’s leaders in rates of mental health hospitalization.38 (For a discussion of the study’s research methodology, see the appendix.)

90

Edison Park Norwood Park

O’Hare International Airport

Forest Glen Jefferson Park Portage Park

West Ridge

Edgewater

North Park Albany Park

Lincoln Square

Irving Park

Dunning 294

Belmont Cragin

Austin

290

290

45

C H I CA G O 55 Garfield Ridge Clearing

55

Uptown

North Center

Midway International Airport

Hermosa

Logan Square 90

Humboldt Park West East Garfield Garfield Park Park North Lawndale

Lake Michigan

Lake View

Avondale Montclare

294

Rogers Park

Lincoln Park Near North Side

West Town

Near West Side Lower West Side

Loop Near South Side

South Lawndale

BridgeDouglas port McKinley Oakland Park 90 Brighton Grand Washington Archer Park New Blvd KenPark Heights wood City Gage Hyde West Park Park Elsdon Avalon West EngleWoodlawn Park West Chicago Engle- wood Lawn Lawn wood Burnside Greater South Grand Shore Crossing 90 Auburn Ashburn South Gresham Chatham Chicago Calumet Washington 94 Heights Heights Beverly

294

Armour Square

Mount Greenwood

Roseland

Pullman

Morgan Park

South Deering

East Side

West Pullman 57

Riverdale

Hegewisch

Illinois-Indiana Border

FIGURE 0.2. City of Chicago community areas and study communities Note: Darkened areas indicate study participants’ communities.

14 INTRODUCTION

TABLE 0.2 Study Participants’ Communities: Select Social Indicators

Study participants’ communities† City of Chicago United States

Poverty rate

Unemployment rate

Percent African American

Homicide rate (per 100,000)*

37

25

94‡

46

22 12

12 4

31 13

16 5

Sources: Data from Suniya Farooqui, Chicago Community Area Indicators, 2015 (Chicago: Social Impact Research Center, Heartland Alliance, 2017); Chicago Police Department, “Crimes—2001 to Present,” 2018, https://data .cityofchicago.org /Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-present /ijzp-q8t2; Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime in the U.S,” accessed July 18, 2019, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s. * Figures listed represent average annual homicide rates for the years 2006–2015. † Austin, Lorenzo’s West Side community of origin, is excluded from these figures. ‡ Racial demographic data for the New City community are excluded from this figure. New City serves as a point of convergence for three highly segregated areas of Chicago’s South Side: one Latino, one black, and one white. As the community remains highly segregated despite the substantial presence of three racial/ethnic groups, to include the percentage of African American residents (24 percent) in the calculation of this figure would have implied a level of integration that does not exist.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

Chapter 1 begins with a brief prelude introducing the dynamics of Chicago’s traditional black street gangs, particularly during the 1990s, before it dives into the fracturing of these gangs during the first decade or so of the twenty-first century. In particular, this chapter examines the effects of a number of sociohistorical developments that served to weaken these gangs organizationally as well as the internal rebellions led by young gang members that ultimately shattered them. Chapter 2 explores how youthful gang members, in response to these new and evolving realities, have reconstructed gangs on the South Side of Chicago in radically new ways by rejecting traditional gang ideologies, practices, and forms of organization.

Chapter 3 addresses the topic of gang violence and, in particular, how the changes described in the first two chapters have reshaped the nature of gang violence on Chicago’s South Side, as the top-down, large-scale drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to increasingly local, expressive, and unpredictable patterns of violence. Chapter 4 explores how to account for the persistence of gangs and violence in Chicago in the wake of the transformations described in the preceding chapters. This chapter makes a case for understanding street gangs in terms of the various material and psychosocial functions that they play in the lives of young people facing desperate conditions and bleak prospects. In doing so, this chapter

15 INTRODUCTION

challenges mainstream interpretations of these groups as criminal associations and of gang members as pathological.

The final chapter and conclusion tackle the subjects of violence prevention and gang intervention. Informed by the preceding analysis, chapter 5 offers context-driven critiques of two “universal� violence prevention models, the focused deterrence policing strategy embraced by the CPD and the Cure Violence public health model, both of which have been highly touted and widely celebrated but have ultimately failed to reduce levels of violence in Chicago. Employing knowledge of prevailing patterns of gang organization, dynamics, and violence, this chapter attempts to elucidate these failures. The conclusion distills the lessons of the book and applies those lessons to delineate an alternative strategy for reducing gang violence rooted in addressing the conditions that ultimately fuel this violence and engaging gang members as active agents in efforts to that end. The conclusion also makes the case that the current moment presents a unique opportunity for bold, meaningful intervention in Chicago to address gangs and reduce violence, while calling into question the political will to pursue such an agenda.

“Views from the Streets offers what is deeply needed but rarely accomplished in contemporary gang research: a grounded analysis providing a convincing, cogent understanding of local history and social dynamics. Most refreshingly, it appreciates rather than ironicizes and pathologizes the voices of gang members. This is the book I’ve been waiting for: a nuanced explanation that matters.”

Robert Garot , author of Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets

“The most important book on Chicago gangs in decades, Views from the Streets vividly describes how and why African American gangs in Chicago fractured and radically transformed. In recounting this story, Roberto R. Aspholm gives voice to the anguished cries of young men trying desperately to create meaning in impossible conditions.”

John Hagedorn , author of A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture

“In this path-breaking book, Aspholm reminds us that our understandings of contemporary gang culture remain mired in nostalgia and urban legend. Views from the Streets provides an unprecedented look at the new social dynamics resulting from public housing demolitions, displacement, and pervasive carceral control. It is indispensable reading for anyone wishing to understand contemporary gangs and for all who hope to end urban violence.”

Cedric Johnson , author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

“In Views from the Streets, Aspholm brings research on Chicago gangs into the twenty-first century, where social media, cell phones, and an unabashed sense of individualism and democracy have brought about the demise of the city’s once monolithic corporate gangs. Aspholm’s nuanced study provides a new—and much needed—theoretical lens on contemporary gang life that will set the stage for a new generation of gang scholars.”

Andrew Papachristos , Northwestern University

“Aspholm dares to tell a complex and layered story of life in Chicago. By dismissing the commonplace deficit-based narratives on black life in street organizations (gangs), readers are challenged to confront the residual affects of disinvestment and displacement. Instead of a ‘gang problem,’ Chicago has a white supremacy problem rooted in tactics of fracture, isolation, marginalization, and containment.”

David Stovall , University of Illinois at Chicago

Roberto R. Aspholm is assistant professor of social work at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

STUDIES IN TRANSGRESSION Cover image: Magnum Photos © Leonard Freed, Chicago, Illinois, 1987 Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu

P R I N T E D I N T H E U. S . A .